Our call for participation is now closed.
Thanks to the 1000 artists who trust us enough to submit their works. Be sure we will watch them with attention, being aware that electronic poetry is fragile, delicate : a quivering…
The individual announcement of the selection should arrive at the beginning of October, the latest.
The 33rd edition of the Festival Les Instants Vidéo will take place in November 2020 (exhibition, screenings, performances…) in Marseille, Friche la Belle de Mai and in other spaces in the city. As usual, the festival will also take place in other cities in France and abroad. For each of the spaces, a specific program will be display.
This 33rd edition is more than ever in accordance with the dream that led to the creation of the festival in 1988: a laboratory where our poetical and political rights can be implemented, plainly, with delight, despite an international context increasingly hostile to freedom of expression of fragile and critical words.
This year, we will try to push the limits of the welcoming of art works, since we announced last February our desire to go on the search for the beauty of a boundless gesture.
This tumultuous journey gradually led us to create what we finally named draft in bodies and minds, an assembly of past and present words and images, that will be spread throughout the festival.
This construction, altogether delicate and ferocious, was mainly built during the unsettling times we came through and called “solitary confinement”. This experience of public health brought to light a form of governance on a world scale, based on the fear that the worst could occur if we don’t apply to ourselves the Voluntary Servitude La Boétie once decried.
An anxiety-inducing propaganda is now paralysing even our most raging dreams of emancipation, telling us: Life, death is stalking you!, a sword of Damocles taking diverse forms, all equals, such as islamic terrorism, war, a pandemic, the arrival of migrants, global warming or an economic crisis… Under these circumstances, we are asked to get used to an ugliness hidden behind a pseudo beauty.
Putting up with it, we are not always able find the strength to resist to the dogmatisms of the past, be they religious or political, promising a dangerously fantasized Eden.
And yet, amidst that chaos, voices and gestures break into the night to make another possible world, here and now. These are the words of poets and all the mutineers who will never give up their desire. Together, they shout these words that repluck up our courage: Death, life is stalking you!
This amazing sentence first appeared in 1965, on the back of the necrophiliac’s costume worn by the surrealist artist Jean Benoît. Annie Le Brun celebrates him in her so deep book « Un espace inobjectif ».
The 10 drafts accompanying Les Instants Vidéo new edition in Marseille (Friche la Belle de Mai) all end with this joyful threat, which finally came to us as the title for the festival.
More than ever this year Les Instants Vidéo will meet their initial project of combining the “change lives” of Rimbaud and the “change the world” of Marx.
Death, life is stalking you!
Photo: Il est libre / Jean-Jacques Lequeu (France, 1798)